iPhone Roundup Review

You'd be forgiven for thinking that iTunes' only genuine brainteaser is how such a magnificent product as the Eurogamer App can retail for the low, low price of £2.39 [good sucking up there - Ed]. Yet in fact, the platform is filled with puzzlers, with venerable ancients like Trism and the perpetual delight factory that is Drop7 rubbing shoulders with new releases such as Lumines (which is currently in desperate need of a new control scheme patch).

Puzzle games are a good match for the App Store, given the iPhone development community's habit of iterating furiously on a handful of themes and churning out dozens of very quiet variations on the same idea, and, while falling blocks and matching threes tend to dominate the landscape, there are also a nice range of smart oddities emerging, too. Below I've gathered together a representative mixture: a few older games, a couple of new ones, and at least one in which you help a cow organise his finances. Enjoy.

Critter Crunch

• Developer: Starwave/Capybara Games
• Price: £1.19

Capybara Games' multi-colour eat-'em-up is a mobile phone classic, and it's already been around on the App Store for quite a while. With a PSN version recently released, however, the cheaper iPhone instalment is still worth a look.

Conforming to that old Woody Allen line about nature being a giant restaurant, Critter Crunch casts you in the role of Biggs, a chunky kind of mutant cantaloupe, by the looks of it, whose job is to prod the local food chain into action by feeding small bugs to medium bugs and medium bugs to big bugs in order to make them explode and turn into jewels and money.

As such, Critter Crunch is an ideal means for children to learn how tightly the separate worlds of the animal kingdom and the jewellery industry are bound together, and, despite its queasy mixture of swallowing and regurgitating living creatures, Capybara's adventure manages to remain strangely cute.

I'm not saying I'd necessarily like to meet Biggs outside my house on a late December evening - although I'm pretty certain that if I reacted quickly enough, I could probably boot him into the kitchens of that slightly obnoxious up-market bakery over the road - but the iPhone port of his game is as colourful, hypnotic and polished as it is on every other platform it's been released on - which is quickly becoming every other platform. With an excellent interface and plenty of addictive chaining, this is brilliant stuff.

9/10

Cash Cow

• Developer: Chillingo
• Price: £1.79

I'm hoping that Cash Cow's developers reverse-engineered the game from the name itself (and if this is the case, I'm looking forward to Butter Fingers and Numbnuts) because there's no other way to explain away such a wonky premise. Cash Cow is a game where you have to help a recently bankrupt Frisian - or Ayrshire or whatever - take control of his finances. Yeah. They went there.

Chillingo's game is a fairly standard match-three variant in which you sort through a board filled with coins, trying to build pennies into nickels, nickels into dimes, and dimes into quarters and dollars, all while the clock ticks down in the background.

It would be easy to write this PC port off as a form of first-wave indoctrination programming for the day that US money becomes the world's first global currency, but, more worryingly, I think it might actually be subliminal preparation for an era in which our bovine brothers are left in control of the world bank.

Whatever its true purpose, Cash Cow is a relatively charming spin on an old formula, with decent touch controls, a range of red herrings to avoid and power-ups to experiment with, and some truly ghastly music which, thankfully, you can turn off. The game's shiny cartoon farm animals are, frankly, the stuff of my worst nightmares, but a nice bonus mode where you can spend your winnings buying items to upgrade your homestead rounds out the package fairly well.

If you only buy one match-three game this year, you probably wouldn't buy this one, but if you're going to buy five or six - and why would you do this? - Cash Cow might make the cud.

I meant 'cut', of course. I just felt like I should drop in a pun about cows somewhere. [Moo. I mean boo. - Ed]

6/10

Word Ace

• Developer: Self Aware Games
• Price: Free

Good news everyone: now you can have the cerebral pleasures of Scrabble mixed with the dingy thrill of professional gambling. It's hard to argue that Word Ace, the results of such a lop-sided union, is a puzzle game in the strictest sense, but I've been playing it solidly for two months, so it's possible you might like it as well. Also, it's free, and in these times of cruel economic hardship - a very good cow friend of mine just had to sell his farm - that's got to count for something.

Self Aware Games' strange little offering is pretty simple to get to grips with: you and a group of other online players are dealt a series of cards, all of which have letters on. Using your personal cards and a communal stash visible to all, you have to piece together the longest word you can - mine are often world-beaters like 'ant' and 'toe' - and then bet fake money on the results.

The presentation is fairly basic, but in combining two such addictive ideas, Word Ace was never going to go that far off the rails. Furthermore, the interface and the online elements are all pretty much perfectly integrated, with precise controls and speedy match-making.

If you like spelling, or if you're addicted to gambling (and if it's both, Hello Mr Morris, you took me for English back in 1993, sorry to hear about the divorce) Word Ace is probably worth at least a few minutes of your time.

7/10

Radial 50

• Developer: Roundthird Interactive
• Price: £1.19

History, in a very inane kind of way, comes pleasantly full circle with the appearance of every Breakout clone that washes up on the shores of the App Store, as one of Steve Jobs' first, er, jobs was working on the original game back in the seventies (although somebody, I think it was Steven Levy, suggested that he paid Steve Wozniak to do all the hard stuff in secret and then royally stiffed him. But that certainly doesn't sound like the Steve Jobs I know).

Something comes pleasantly full circle with Radial 50, too, as it's Breakout played on a circular field, with the paddle moving around the circumference, while you whittle away at concentric defences to hit the jewel in the middle.

Actually, it's not always that pleasant. Sometimes, in fact, it's a little annoying. The problem with Roundthird's game is that, while you're in charge of a paddle that moves in a gentle curve, you control it by moving your finger up and down in a straight line and, while you will inevitably get used to this after a few minutes, it struggles to ever become truly instinctive.

There's also the fact that Radial 50's at its most fun when you're merely staring at the ball as it ricochets madly around inside the maze of internal barriers all by itself. There's nothing terribly wrong with this, but a game that's at its peak when you're just watching it had better have David Hayter doing some of the voices, or it's in big trouble at retail.

4/10

Wriggle

• Developer: Conlan Rios
• Price: 59p

Wriggle is a puzzle game about worms. That sounds pretty grim, unless you happen to be a worm yourself, in which case: how did you get hold of an iPhone?

Whatever it sounds like, Wriggle is simple and fairly clever: a maze game in which you have to tug a blue worm out of a network of tunnels in as few moves as possible.

There are special awards for getting it done in particularly efficient manner, and, as the game progresses, other worms are thrown into the mix to negotiate around. It's the worm-tugging equivalent of parallel parking, essentially, only slightly more fun.

And despite its fairly limited scope, it is fun, in a very basic kind of way. Wriggle isn't going to change your life, then - not like, say, Critter Crunch - but it will give you something pleasantly taxing to do while waiting in line at the post office or arguing off-handedly with a loved one; for 59p, that's not a bad deal.

6/10